1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the civilian or industrial use of robots, more particularly to methods and an apparatus for the control of the pattern of action of a robot.
2. Description of the Related Art
When teaching action to a robot, it had been necessary to first program all of the desired patterns of action and their order and then store them in the robot or a control apparatus of the robot. When the actions are determined by a program, a robot operates exactly according to the patterns of action described in the program. Accordingly, it was not possible to make the actions of the robot more diverse and there were limits to what could be expressed by the actions of the robot. The expressability could not have been said to be adequate.
Recently, as a system for control enabling the actions of a robot to be changed in accordance with the changing dynamic environment around it, the system of subsumption architecture for layered control of basic actions such as avoidance and evasion of obstructions has been proposed (Rodney A. Brooks, "A Robust Layered Control System for A Mobile Robot", IEEE Journal of Robotics and Automation, vol. RA-2, no. 1, March 1986).
According to this system, when the actions belonging to the higher layer are not suitable for the surrounding environment and end in failure, the robot is constantly guided to take action belonging to the lower layer. When conversely the action belonging to the lower layer failed, however, it was difficult to positively guide the robot to take action belonging to the higher layer.
Further, according to the subsumption architecture system, patterns of action were given by superposition of layered actions. Since however the patterns of actions contained in each layer were fixed, limitations again ended up being placed on the diversity of the patterns of action.
In this way, even in the subsumption architecture system, over-simplification of the patterns of action of the robot could not be avoided and there were limits to the expressability of the operations of the robot itself.